Lost in Las Vegas
Vu Tran’s debut thriller, “Dragonfish,” surprises in ways that readers may not initially expect.
At its core, this richly satisfying work is pure noir. Its narrator, 45-year-old Robert Ruen, is a 20-year veteran of the Oakland police force. Like the many fictional cops and P.I.s who walk the mean streets, Ruen talks tough: “Show me a man with three eyes,” he says, “and I’ll point out his dirty fingernails.”
And a torturous relationship with a woman scars his heart. She is Suzy, a Vietnamese woman whose violent nature matches Ruen’s. After a robbery at a flower shop where she works, Suzy greets Ruen with “a baseball bat in one hand and pruning shears in the other.” The cop nabs the robber, who, he says, was “limping and bleeding from a stab wound to his thigh. The pruning shears had done it.”
Suzy and Ruen marry, but their stormy union crumbles when Suzy walks out.
She turns up in Las Vegas, now married to man named Sonny, whom Ruen describes as “this cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy house and apparently had some shady dealings in town.” The latter pursuits include selling illegally imported live fish like the Asian arowana — the eponymous dragonfish — worth more than $10,000.
After too many bad times at the tables, Sonny one night knocks Suzy down a flight of stairs, breaking her arm. Hearing this news, Ruen heads to Vegas to break Sonny’s arm. When that mission fails, he returns home, only to have Sonny’s thugs strongarm him back when Suzy and a lot of money go missing.
As is usually the case in this sort of thriller, the money is the MacGuffin. “Dragonfish” is about what its characters reveal.
Although Tran draws from a bin of staple noir characters, their behaviors flash sharply, brightly and unpredictably. A history of kicking teeth and bruising limbs aside, Ruen insists that “never, not once, had I truly wanted to kill anyone.” And then there is Victor, one of Sonny’s goons, who at midpoint becomes a linchpin in the plot — and one of the book’s more sympathetic characters — when he shows an unexpected hand.
But it is Suzy who dominates and haunts the story, a considerable feat on Tran’s part since she appears in no scenes that move the action forward. Instead, in a series of flashbacks, Ruen recalls her volatile behavior. And, in a series of heartfelt letters she writes to her daughter, she probes herself and her soul.
Pausing the forward action, the missives detail Suzy and her daughter’s harrowing nine-day journey at sea after the fall of Saigon and the time the two spend in a Malaysian refugee camp. Here Suzy first meets Sonny, who through her eyes becomes a more nuanced character: “[H]e and I came to need each other on that island,” she writes. “It happens in an instant when life becomes startlingly new and frightening and profound, and you turn to the person next to you and see that they feel it too.”
Suzy’s letters are simple yet rich in their images and philosophical musings. Eventually, her absorbing narrative melds beautifully with the book’s main story and its surreal visions of Las Vegas, a terminus for these displaced Vietnamese refugees and their dreams: “Here,” Suzy writes, “the world outside always feels awake and alive with the stories it desperately wants to tell you. ... Nothing here to remind you that the lights will one day go out, that all stories end whether you want them to or not.”
A familiar noir trope — the missing woman — blooms darkly in “Dragonfish” as the story of a lost people, a theme that Tran renders exquisitely, rating the book a place on the top shelf of literary thrillers.